Shoegi Lessons
by hungrytiger11
Summary: In the fallout of turning Ino into something like him, Shikamaru teaches Ino to play Shoegi, and contemplates eternity. Sequel to vampire story, Taste; written for ishime.


The weeks after...after most their students die...shutter by. Shikamaru finds, these days, he remembers those days only in fractured pieces, and wishes he remembered them not at all. But hey, he's apparently going to live forever, so maybe the years will pile on and he really will forget.

Vampirism. Even now the word feels strange on his tongue.

Things move to rearrange themselves into a new normal. Ino stays at his house most nights; this leads their little gang of friends to all believe they're "an item now," as Sakura puts it. Ino's friend gets a funny look on her face when she says it, like its not quite as happy of news as it should be. Still, Ino doesn't correct them and neither does he. He wants- but he isn't sure Ino wants that, and so he waits. They both have the time now, since he brought her and not any of their students back from death. This is what Ino doesn't understand the most- or so she says. Why her; why not them?

He knows it would be troubling to her to tell her it has always been her. It always would be now. So he doesn't tell her anything at all.

Still every night he finds her in his apartment. When he was first turned (when he died and woke up on a battle field alone among the corpses), it scared him, this lack of sleep. Ino claimed it was only lonely, and asked him to teach her Shogi to pass the time.

In the day she doesn't do much either. Every mission she's offered is turned down, and she has refused to go back to her one remaining student since learning of the others' deaths. Periodically, that last one student loiters in the alleyway below Shikamaru's apartment complex, but if he's ever exchanged words with his sensei, Shikamrau has remained unaware.

"Where do you go, during the day?" he asks her one night, the Shogi board again before them. She plays with first one piece, then another, as if toying with which one to move.

"Some days I go to help my mother in the flower shop, though she thinks I look too thin. Food should not smell so good when I can't have it." Her lips come out in a pout and he laughs, which feels good.

"Makes seeing Chouji a bit harder," he agrees with that same grim humor.

"Sometimes," she ventures, moving a piece. "My father is there instead. He gives me a dressing down and tries to send me to the Missions Office."

"What happens then?"

"I leave."

Shikamaru says nothing to that.

"I talk to Chouji, some days, if I can find him. Or Sakura-chan, but she's rarely away from the hospital where-"

"Where Tsunade-sama will be. Her dressing downs are awful."

Ino doesn't laugh like Shikamaru did a minute ago.

"Yeah," she says. "Exactly."

"Sometimes," she says. "I treat Naruto to ramen."

Shikamaru is rather impressed by this. As a highly valued ninja, Naruto's getting regular missions and regular paychecks with them, but that has not always been the case. Naruto's view of the world is very black and white in a way, Shikamaru has begun to suspect, only an orphan's can be: Good triumphs evil. Friendship always wins. Food is love. For someone who can't eat, it is kind of Ino to give what Naruto will most easily recognize as friendship.

"That's good," he says. "I thought you might-"

"Might think I'd become some monster and be unable to step out the door? I did wonder. How could they not see? How could they not tell? I'm dead. They should notice something!"

Shikamaru reaches his hand out over the board, reaching, not for a playing piece, but for her hand.

"You couldn't tell. About me- you couldn't."

He misses the scar that ran down her palm. She got it when she was eight and had stolen her father's kunai. It healed over when she turned. It is still her hand he is holding though.

"I know," she says, looking down at their hands. Her thumb brushes back and forth against the side of his index finger. "And I thought- you are so good at shogi."

He laughs again, but tension is unabated. "And you thought you'd ask me how to play?"

"You can see 200 moves ahead. Isn't that what they say? Isn't that what Asuma-sensei used to say? So I thought, Shikamaru must surely see. He must. Where is this going?"

Where is the game going? Where is the hand-holding going? Where is their un-life going?

Three guesses as to what Ino means, and the first two don't count. he draws back his hand, leans back in his chair.

"I suppose there are several ways things can go."

She has a playing piece in her fingers now, and rubs it absently against her lips.

"We can-uh," She really shouldn't be doing that, he thinks and concentrates some more on all the different scenarios he's played over and over in his head. "We can do nothing. Let things run their course."

"Someone won't notice the two of us, fifty years old still looking all of twenty-two?"

He almost hates to bring it up. He'd rather think of her laughing and talking to their other friends, but she did ask. Shikamaru respects her enough to tell what she has asked.

"People die, Ino. Shinobi most of all. For awhile we are just aging rather gracefully, and eventually people forget. Was Ino with the genin class from five years ago? Four years ago? It blurs and we stay and serve the city."

"Not enough would die." she says, and it is true. "Kinota-chan died. Nao-chan, Asuma-kun. But- I don't want it to be enough."

"No," he agrees, very quietly. "Me neither."

"We could always tell Naruto," he says into the silence that followed his first plan. "He will be Hokage one day. He's a demon host; he knows what its like to be different and, anyway, no one knows how long a demon host can live, if it is dies of natural causes."

A small smile plays across her lips. "We could be his advisors."

"We'd have to tell everyone though."

They stare into each other's eyes, just a moment, and let that dream drop.

"My other idea is a fake death, some dangerous mission far away. After that? Travel, maybe."

Shinobi do travel, of course-A mission to kill someone in Iron Country, find a document from the Hidden Sand. Its not a day at the beach, soaking up sunshine though. Ino loves the sunshine, and sure enough the thought brings a smile to her lips. Just for a second though, and she's pushed back her chair, moving to the kitchen for a glass and drink.

"So what you're saying is, nothing has to happen now."

No. Nothing for years, at least as far as living an eternity goes. Laughing with a friend, working with family, even teaching again- all these things will go on and on. The smallest part of himself that he allows to think of it wonders if Ino will stay with him, if that will happen. He tells himself to forget the moment, forget that thought, dangerous as it is. She smiled tonight, let that be enough for now.


End file.
